<p></p><p>Mozambique's National Cashew Institute (INCAJU) hopes to increase the amount of cashew nuts marketed by 25 per cent to 100,000 tons. <br></p> <p>Speaking to reporters during a conference on cashew which began in Maputo on Tuesday, organized by the African Cashew Alliance, the INCAJU director, Filomena Maiopue, said that 80,000 tons of nuts were marketed in the 2014-2015 campaign. <br></p> <p>That, at least, is the figure that has entered the official statistics, although Maipoue, cited in Wednesday's issue of the independent daily “O Pais”, said she is well aware that an unquantified amount of nuts are sold, processed and consumed in the informal sector. She hoped that INCAJU could help organize the informal sector, bringing benefits to the state through the payment of taxes. <br></p> <p>Mozambique was once the largest producer of cashews in the world, with an annual production of 200,000 tons in the mid-1970s. The current level of production makes Mozambique the fourth largest African producer, behind Ivory Coast, Guinea-Bissau and Tanzania. <br></p> <p>The cashew orchard suffered severely during the war of destabilization, when trees were no longer cared for, and pests and diseases raged unchecked. After the war ended in 1992, the cashew nut processing factories were privatized - but the World Bank then deliberately sabotaged the processing industry, making full liberalization of the cashew trade one of the conditions for further loans to the Mozambican government. <br></p> <p>The World Bank policy was designed to ensure that the cashew nuts were not processed in Mozambique at all, but were exported raw to India, where Indian processors would benefit from them. By 2002, all the cashew processing factories had been closed, throwing thousands of workers out of their jobs. <br></p> <p>Belatedly Mozambique began to fight back against the World Bank dictat, and the industry revived, but using smaller factories, relying on manual, rather than mechanical, shelling of the nuts. <br></p> <p>There are now 20 processing plants, mostly in the northern provinces of Nampula and Cabo Delgado, employing around 11,000 workers. 30,000 tons of nuts are now processed a year - which means that the majority of the nuts marketed still leave the country unprocessed. <br></p> <p>Africa produces about three million tons of cashew nuts a year, which is half of the global production. But only ten per cent of these nuts are processed in Africa.<br></p><p></p>